Abstract
Speech sounds are an essential vehicle of information exchange and meaning expression in approximately 7,000 spoken languages in the world. What functional constraints and evolutionary mechanisms lie behind linguistic diversity of sound systems is under ongoing debate; in particular, it remains conflicting whether there exists any universal relationship between these constraints despite of diverse sounds systems cross-linguistically. Here, we conducted cross-linguistic typological and phylogenetic analyses to address the characteristics of constraints on linguistic diversity of vowel systems. First, the typological analysis revealed a power-law based dependence between the global structural dispersion and the local focalization of vowel systems and validated that such dependence was independent of geographic region, language family, and linguistic affiliation. Second, the phylogenetic analysis further illustrated that the observed dependence resulted from correlated evolutions of these two structural properties, which proceeded in an adaptive process. These results provide empirical evidence that self-organization mechanisms helped shape vowel systems and common functional constraints took effect on the evolution of vowel systems in the world’s languages.
Highlights
Human beings canorganize hundreds of speech sounds to communicate with each other
We applied the Spearman’s correlation analysis to investigate the relation between Effective DE and focalization estimate (FE) based on all 532 vowel systems from the database
The result showed a significant negative correlation between the global and local structural properties (Spearman’s rho = −0.8427, p-value = 0.0). To further verify this correlation, we fitted a linear mixedeffect model having two random intercepts on the whole dataset
Summary
Human beings can (re)organize hundreds of speech sounds to communicate with each other. Speech sounds in spoken languages undergo constant changes to achieve efficient and effective communications between speakers and listeners (Poulisse, 1997). Such communicative demands serve as the primary forces that drive the (re)organization of sound systems (de Boer, 2000). A recent comparison of approximately 7,000 spoken languages in the world has revealed a high degree of structural diversity in sound systems (Gordon, 2016).
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